Trustee exposes malaise at HRSB

A school board member recently resigned, stating in a letter that the HRSB “Every Student Can Learn” model of system-wide student testing and mandated outcomes favoured by Superintendent Carole Olsen stifling “creativity, innovation, and engagement” among children and teachers. (TED PRITCHARD / Staff / File)

School has resumed with a bang at the Halifax regional school board. Superintendent Carole Olsen’s appointment as Deputy Education Minister was the first shock. Last week, a “letter to school trustees,” written by Dr. David Cameron, an elected Halifax South End school board member, delivered another, perhaps more revealing, bombshell that rocked the HRSB Burnside corporate park headquarters.

In the now infamous letter, Trustee Cameron announced he wouldn’t seek re-election and, instead of bowing out quietly, he broke with the usual protocol in identifying three major “failures” of public accountability that influenced his decision.

Coming from David Cameron, a highly respected Canadian political science professor and former vice-president of Dalhousie University, the letter not only carries weight, but provides profound lessons about the sad state of local democracy at the elected school board level.

It was not a spur-of-the-moment decision, but rather the result of a long, agonizing process. Over his four years in office, Cameron enjoyed representing his constituents and doing “what he could” to respond to their concerns. Gradually, he came to realize that, in his words, “the frustrations outweigh the rewards” and “the chances of making real progress” were “too slim” to justify “investing another four years” of his time.

What were the major impediments? The three “most troublesome” problems identified by Cameron were the excessive centralization of the system, the failure of the elected board to hold the superintendent accountable, and the “drift” toward a “corporate governance model,” eroding the role of trustees as representatives of community interests.

Centralization was a serious problem because real authority was now concentrated in the Department of Education and in the board’s own central administration. The HRSB “Every Student Can Learn” model of system-wide student testing and mandated outcomes favoured by Superintendent Olsen was cited as stifling “creativity, innovation, and engagement” among children and teachers. “Centralized control,” he claimed, “is a recipe for generalized mediocrity.”

Cameron blames the elected board, his own colleagues, for failing in their principal role — holding the superintendent accountable in the public interest. Simply accepting the superintendent’s reports at face value and spending countless hours discussing test results were clear signs of the flight from accountability.

The superintendent’s annual appraisal was a missed opportunity to assess “how the system was performing.” Instead, it amounted to “a pat on the back” for Superintendent Olsen. That remained the case even after the controversial 2010 Ken Fells “student takedown,” the leak of the incriminating video, and loud public calls for Olsen’s resignation.

His most damning criticism was reserved for the corporate model of governance, promoted by Nova Scotia consultant Jim Gunn and championed by Dartmouth Trustee Gin Yee, the lone survivor of the 2007 school board firing.

Focusing on “school board efficiency” had come at a steep price — slowly killing local democracy by choking off the representative function. It consigned elected trustees to a much more narrowly defined role, protected behind a corporate shield, yet simply unable to effectively represent their constituents.

School board trustees are elected to ride herd on the superintendent and expected to ensure public accountability for the spending of school tax dollars, totalling $400 million in the case of the HRSB.

Here, too, Cameron found the elected board sadly wanting. The board’s annual budget process he described as “shameful” because it “ceded control to the administration” and, by default, took “the path of least resistance” in maintaining the status quo.

Trustee Cameron’s letter should not be simply dismissed as the grumbling of an elected board member on his way out the door. Speaking out publicly and raising a ruckus are completely out of character for him and, like Peter Finch in the feature film Network, he simply couldn’t “take it anymore.”

If elected trustees of the calibre of David Cameron cannot exercise much influence and come to feel like “rubber stamp” officials, then school board accountability is little more than democratic window dressing.

That damning letter is also bound to raise fundamental questions about whether elected boards, in their current form, are worth saving from extinction. The whole episode demonstrates that the school board governance system needs to be completely re-engineered.